Thursday, October 31, 2013

Learning To Expect Delays But Not Lose Heart

I literally just sat down at my laptop with the blank Compose window for this post showing the title "Home Study Visit Tomorrow, No Pressure Right?" I was planning to wax poetic and comical about my urge to scrub every nook and cranny of our house even though this particular person is not particularly interested in our physical house, and my notion gleaned from movies and a friend's testimony that one must bake homemade cookies for this type of visit and preferably burn them in order to have a good story to tell later...

Then the very nice lady who is doing our home study called to say her husband has to have surgery tomorrow and could we reschedule for Monday morning? Though I wanted to say "Surgery? Lame excuse. Our future kids are on the line here, lady", I actually said "Monday morning is just fine. We'll see ya then."

I hung up, texted Trent about the change, scooted my now ironic laptop screen out of the way, set my head in my hands, shed a few very large tears, sat up, scooted my laptop back towards me and updated this blog post title to the one you see above. You see, this is just more practice for us to get ready to work in a system that is complicated and, at times, heartbreaking.

We originally scheduled our home study visit for tomorrow...but it will actually happen four days from now.

I've found my amount of stress and tears has diminished for each of these delays and I'm realizing that this is really good practice. I don't mean it's teaching us that we can't rely on the various players in this system. We have found ourselves working with amazing people. What I mean is that these delays now are helping us build up a thick skin and a big heart to later deal with even more serious delays and curveballs.

We may be told that a child in our care has a visit with their birth parent on a certain day...but then that birth parent doesn't show up.

We may be told to arrive at court for a hearing on a certain date...but then learn that some random piece of paper is not entirely in order, or some needed person is not present, and be told to come back again at a later time.

We may be told that it looks like a child will be able to go home to his or her parent in a matter of weeks...but then said parent slips up or a new side of the case surfaces and that child can't go home quite as soon as they thought, if at all.

We might be told that a case will be a slam dunk for termination of parental rights and we might quickly be able to head towards adoption of a certain child or children...but then the birth parent is awesome and gets their act together, works their service plan and brings their kids home.

We are discerning a tricky balance here. On one side we are learning that we need to take things with a grain of salt, go with the flow and be aware that things can change or be delayed in the blink of an eye. On the other side, we are learning that we need to dive headfirst into the choppy waters of this commitment, extend our heart to these kids with abandon and know that it will most likely get trampled on along the way.

So our home study got delayed four days? That's a blip compared to some of the stuff we are headed into.

2 comments:

Thank you for this post. I've just spent the majority of my morning reading your blog and have enjoyed it so much. Reading your experiences has given me so much assurance that my husband and I's decision to do this foster-adopt thing is the right one. I was feeling so frustrated with the seemingly interminable process to get licensed, and you're right. These delays are nothing compared to some of the things we'll face with the children placed in our care. P.S. We are in Texas too!